The Guardian and Observer have a somewhat chequered history when it comes to embedding diversity into the organisation.

In principle, it should be easy for us. After all, we are a media organisation committed to social justice, which at its heart is all about equality of opportunity for all sections of society and giving a voice to the voiceless.

But despite creating new processes and having a diversity champion and diversity manager in place over the past few years, progress has been too little and too slow.

Our last sustainability report detailed how an internal review by a diversity consultant had shown that our considerable investment in diversity had actually had the opposite effected to that intended;it marginalised the development of equality and diversity, and limited its effectiveness and impact.

In terms of the media industry in general, benchmark exercises have shown that we fare reasonably well, but that is hardly a comfort given that there are few companies in the world of media that are shining examples of good practice.

In an attempt to step the process of change up a gear, GNM has employed a new head of diversity, Yasir Mirza, who is reporting directly to the managing director, Tim Brooks.

Mirza wants to put diversity at the heart of GNM's business strategy, embedding the social, business, and legal case across all departments.

Brooks recognises the importance of achieving this goal: "Unless we vigorously reflect the diversity of the people we cater to, the extent we fail to do that will be the extent to which we fail to be a sustainable business in the long term."

Beyond the importance of reflecting the diversity of British society in our content, it also makes commercial sense. For example, the Guardian launched an online diversity advertising jobs network in 2010. That can only be truly successful if we are attracting a broad range of people to our website.

After his first few months in the job, Mirza's initial analysis was that the main preoccupation within GNM had in the past been to concentrate on the "numbers game in recruitment", which he believes highlights a "shallow" understanding of what diversity is all about.

Mirza says the numbers game is superficial because unless we address deep-seated cultural issues we could end up employing minority staff who just replicate the existing dominant socio-economic staff mix. That is not diversity.

He also points out that with large-scale redundancies in response to structural changes in the industry, any opportunities to change the nature of the organisation through recruitment will be limited in the foreseeable future.

Mirza's strategy, and much of his effort, is on seeking to improve the balance of our editorial content, and extending the breadth and depth of voices we use, whilst also ensuring we practice what we preach by mirroring good practices internally. This he feels is paramount in creating a pull factor of having a more diverse workforce in the future. This is a strategy that is aimed at gaining substantive long term results.

For this reason, Mirza has ditched a number of the 32 recommendations for change made by a diversity consultant in 2008/09, which focussed largely on recruitment, and has also amended one of the five board objectives that were set at the same time. Rather than concentrate on utilising flexible working to achieve business objectives, Mirza has changed this to improving the culture of the organisation to be more inclusive.

Following an update of our diversity performance in a blogpost in January 2010, our auditors Two Tomorrows pointed out that back in 2003 the company was making similar commitments and at the time said it would "be judged on actions and results rather than well-meaning intentions".

While Two Tomorrows pointed to an increase in workforce ethnic diversity from 9% to 12% since 2004 as a sign of positive change, the recent redundancy programme has eradicated nearly all those gains with figures showing that in June 2010 it had fallen back to 9.3%

Two Tomorrows concluded: "Perceptions of readers on ethnic coverage and the level of ethnic readership has shown little in the way of improvement, that latter showing the company languishing well behind some other quality newspapers.

"In this context, the shift of focus away from recruitment to a more 'embedded' approach makes sense, and we have seen evidence that there is real top-level commitment to this drive. We commend the commitment at a time when the harsh commercial realities are demanding immediate attention of the leadership.

"Only time will tell if it succeeds, and we will be looking to see 'results rather just well-meaning intentions'".

A number of projects are now underway, and GNM has begun to produce some of the results it is aiming for:

The Diversity Ambassador programme

Sixty community champions/organisations covering all equality strands were invited to GNM to learn about GNM diversity strategy in June. The aim is for these champions to act as "ambassadors" on behalf of the Guardian in promoting the paper, creating direct links with marginalised communities about our editorial coverage, and casting our net far and wide in promoting careers at GNM through trusted sources. The hope is that this will create a two-way dialogue between GNM and these communities, present new channels for editorial content by and on minority groups, and career promotion at GNM.

Diversity information for staff

An internal hub of diversity reference material dedicated to each strand of diversity was launched in July to give staff up-to-date information on the company's strategy and policies. The site also lists a database of 450 ambassador organisations, legislation updates, best practice, diversity events, as well as a religious calendar. The aims are to create a useful tool to help foster a culture of inclusion internally, and to provide a useful external contacts tool for editors and journalists to tap into a wide range of minority groups in an attempt to provide authentic coverage and representation of such groups.

Minority Media conferences

The Guardian and Observer editorial department has been organising a series of Minority Media conferences to better understand how we can improve the representation of marginalised groups in our editorial coverage, and to help to get their voices into the mainstream. This is core to the Guardian's liberal principles of social equality and giving a voice to the voiceless. By January 2011, editorial will have organised four separate workshops with experts from black minority ethnic; Muslim; lesbian, gay and bisexual; disabled; Jewish; Hindu and Sikh communities.

Minority Writers workshops

In an attempt to encourage new writers from diverse backgrounds for various sections of the Guardian, we have started running Minority Writers' workshops with commissioning editors. The sessions serve several functions:

· To inform new writers on how to approach commissioning editors with ideas

· To explore ways of encouraging more writers from minority backgrounds to write for the Guardian

· To provide an opportunity for minority writers to pitch their ideas

· To create a link between new writers and Guardian editors

· To provide an opportunity for editors to become more conscious of diversity and inclusion issues of minority communities

The programme of events is already starting to bear fruit. In the wake of the initial workshop in February, the Guardian agreed to six new commissions from minority writers within the G2 features section and the Comment is Free website. A further two commissions emerged from the first Minority Media conference with the black and Muslim communities held a month later.

GNM's diversity objectives

1. To increase the diversity of our UK users

2. To strengthen our ability to create distinctive output and business services through diversity

3. To increase the diversity of the workforce including the board and heads of department